[MUSIC] Dr David Silberklang, Yad Vashem, Senior Historian in the Research Institute at Yad Vashem. The subject that we'll be discussing today is the Final Solution and the first part that we'll be discussing is the decision by the Nazi regime on the Final Solution. The Final Solution was the Nazi project to murder every single Jew that they could lay their hands on. And to destroy everything Jewish. In the course of this operation, the Nazis succeeded in murdering some 6 million Jews and in wiping off the map countless Jewish communities. One of the questions that historians have tried to understand over the course of the decades since the end of World War II and the Holocaust, is when and under what circumstances and for what reasons did the Nazi regime decide to kill the Jews. And over the course of research and debate by historians, two main schools of thought developed and argued with each other over many decades over the question of when did Hitler and the Nazi regime decide to murder the Jewish people. One of the reasons that there was such a debate was that a very important document that we might have thought we could find in all the Nazi documents was missing. And that is some sort of order written or verbal from Hitler to the regime to his underlings to begin the operation of murdering the Jews. The two schools of thought divided into the intentionalists on the one hand and the functionalists on the other hand. The intentionalists argued that in order to understand Nazi decision making, and Hitler's decision making, we needed to place Hitler and Nazi ideology at the center of Nazi policy making. No decisions could happen of any major import without Hitler. And ideology was always at the center of all of Hitler's major decisions, first and foremost, regarding the Jews. The intentionalists further argued that, built into Nazi ideology, was a belief that the Jews were a threat to the world, first to Germany, but to all the world, a threat of cosmic significance. And therefore Germany with Hitler at the lead must set out in order to deal with this cosmic threat to the very existence of humanity in the world. The view of the Jew was a racist view that argued that Jews could not change. Jews could not be taught to behave differently. That Jews as they were threatened the world and could not change. The intentionalists argued that the idea of murdering all the Jews was built into Hitler's policymaking from the very beginning of the Nazi regime, if not even from sooner than that in Hitler's mind. The functionalists, on the other hand, argued that although of course there was a Nazi ideology and clearly Hitler and the leaders of the Nazi regime were anti-semitic. Actually, ideology and anti-semitism were secondary features in the course of Nazi decision making. And rather in order to understand how and when and why the Nazis reached the decision to murder the Jews, we need to look not only at Hitler but even more so at various underlings and middle level officials and processes of history. And that the decision to murder the Jews arose not based upon a op priori decision from the very beginning of the regime, with the regime constantly searching for how to get to the murder. But rather, that the decision to murder the Jews arose as a function of events and hence the functionalists. The intentionalists argue that we can understand Nazi policy throughout the Nazi period, only if we understand that they were constantly searching for a way to kill the Jews. The functionalists argued that the zigzags so to speak that we might see in Nazi policy making in the 1930s or in the first part of World War II were not some kind of Nazi attempt to find out how to murder the Jews. But rather genuine Nazi attempts to find out what they could do with these Jews whom they clearly disliked. Where could they send them? What could they do with them? And the idea of murder emerged only at a much later date. Although that date was not clear and different people had different ideas. Now we can demonstrate the sources for this debate. Why do they even have a discussion like this, if we were to look at a number of Nazi documents as illustrations? And that's what I'd like to do right now. And what I would like to do is share with you excerpts from four documents. Two from the pre-war period, two from the very first year of World War II. If we were look at the pre-war period. We have a memorandum written in the foreign ministry in the Department of the Foreign Ministry that dealt with Jewish policy. January 25th, 1939, where this memorandum was reviewing Nazi policy regarding the Jews in the year 1938. And looking ahead to what will be the policy for the coming year 1939, the year in which World War II of course ultimately broke out. And at the heading of the document the subject the Jewish question as a factor in foreign policy in 1938. The aim of German Jewish policy immigration. If we follow that five days later, with the infamous speech of Adolf Hitler, before the Reichstag, the German Parliament, on the sixth anniversary of Hitler coming to power. This is January 30th, 1939. It was a famous speech. It was filmed, and there Hitler issued his infamous threat to the Jews. Today I will once more be a prophet. If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth. And thus the victory of jury but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe. >> [FOREIGN] >> [APPLAUSE] >> [FOREIGN] >> And we might ask ourselves, so what is Nazi policy in January 1939 when the regime was already well on the way to planning what became World War II. Was the policy to get the Jews to emigrate for a variety of Nazi reasons? Or was the policy, would Hitler seem to be threatening? If the war that he was already planning should break out, it would bring about the annihilation of the Jewish people. We can carry this further with documents from the beginning of the war. For example, on September 21, of 1939 before Poland had actually surrendered, a week before. Reinhard Heydrich, one of the most important, the most senior officers in the SS, and the one who had the most to do with Jewish policy in the SS. He wrote a memorandum to the SS units that were operating in Poland at the time. And in that memorandum he wrote the following. I refer to the conference held in Berlin today and again point out that the planned total measures, that is the final aim, are to be kept strictly secret. Distinction must be made between the final aim and the stages leading to the fulfillment of this final aim. And Heydrich's goes on not to explain what the final aim is, which, of course, is secret. But rather to explain what measures need to be taken regarding Jews in Poland immediately. And the measures that he describes, bringing them to larger cities near rail lines. And then beginning to move them eastward, seems to indicate that the policy the final aim, as he called it, was somehow to get the Jews to all go eastward, somehow to leave the German sphere of influence or maybe to be in the easternmost part of the German sphere of influence. And we can follow that up finally with one last document. Heinrich Himmler, the commander of the SS, Heinrich's superior, perhaps the most important person in Nazi Germany in the actual planning and leading of the details of the Final Solution. On May 25 1940, Himmler wrote a memorandum to Hitler while the operations in the battles were still going on in Western Europe. He delivered it to Hitler when he met him or somewhere in Belgium where Hitler was operating at the time. He wrote a long memorandum about relations on the reflections, excuse me, on the treatment of peoples of alien races in the east. And in that memorandum describing how all the various different kinds of people in Poland would be denied an education, would be denied the right to speak or study their own language. He goes on to say cruel and tragic as every individual case may be. This method is still the mildest and best one, if out of inner conviction, one rejects as un-German and impossible the Bolsheviks method of physical extermination of a people. In May 1940, Himmler, who became the field commander of the Final Solution, not long after this was saying that the physical annihilation of a people is unGerman. So what was German policy during those years? When did they decide on the Final Solution? The debate was never resolved. But as we move ahead in this session, we will try to examine how that Final Solution developed. [MUSIC]
